Wars of the Roses: Bloodline: Book 3 (The Wars of the Roses) (14 page)

‘The only good news, my lady, is that all pretence is thrown aside now. There will be no more lies. Many men who might have stood by and waited will come to you. The army is already the largest I have ever seen. It will grow further, as the men of the north come to preserve the true king from traitors.’

‘And we will crush him then?’ Margaret said faintly.

Derry nodded, reaching out to her and letting his hand fall away without touching.

‘We are not far from forty thousand men, my lady, with a fine solid core of warriors and archers.’

‘I have seen armies torn apart, Master Brewer,’ Margaret said faintly. ‘There is nothing certain once the horns are blown.’

Derry swallowed, growing irritated with her. He had a dozen important things to do and comforting Margaret was not one of them. At the same time, he was aware that he felt some trace of arousal. There was just something about a beautiful woman in tears that perked up his spirits. He considered what it might feel like to press his mouth hard on hers, and then shook himself, forcing his mind back on to a safer path.

‘My lady, I must be about my business. There cannot be two kings. What Edward has done is lock us together until there is only one.’

Fourteen days after he had declared himself king in Westminster Hall, Edward rode north with a vast host. The Ides of March, the midpoint of the month, was three days behind. He thought of Caesars as he walked his horse along the London road, away from the city. The winter was still strong on the land and there would be no foraging in the path Margaret had taken with her northerners and Scots. Edward and his captains passed burned manors by the dozen, with villagers running into woods as soon as they sighted his marching ranks.

For such an army, there was no question of using the paved road, more was the pity. Edward had suffered through meetings with Warwick and Fauconberg, who explained that staying on the road would create a line
days
long, so that any vanguard met by the queen’s army would be cut off from support. Rather than become too long a thread, they had to stay in wide formation. The men marched in ranks a mile across, in three squares. The advancing lines clambered through forests and over hills and through streams, slogging through thick clay and mud so glutinous it seemed alive. The city of York was two hundred miles into the cold north and Edward was resigned to losing nine or ten days to the march. His men were well supplied at least, thanks to the favour and wealth of London. Merchant ships had brought the food they needed up the Thames, while the city’s moneylenders seemed to have understood that their futures lay with his.

Edward rode proudly in the front ranks of the centre, surrounded by banners bearing a sun in flames, his father’s falcon and the white rose of York. He had given command of the right wing to the Duke of Norfolk, as the most senior lord present. Warwick and Fauconberg had been given the left, and if the two Nevilles saw any insult in that, they had not shown it. In truth, Edward had not meant it as a criticism of the forces who had been overrun and routed at St Albans, though they made up the bulk of that square. If half the reports coming into the south were correct, the queen’s army was at least the equal of his own. Scouts and merchants were given to exaggeration, but Edward had the sense that he could not delay. Battles could be lost but wars still won. Every day on the road was another for the queen and her lackwit husband to bring in more soldiers and more lords.

Having his lords out in command of their own vast squares also meant that Edward did not have to speak to them, which suited him well enough. He was not even in sight of their portions of his army and he spent his days with the Welsh captains and archers, once again feeling as if he were better suited to being a clan chief than a king. Yet his nineteenth birthday was still a month away and he revelled in his strength and surety of purpose. The army around him was a mass of coloured surcoats over armour and mail, a thousand different family crests woven or painted on to cloth and shields. Beyond the professional soldiers in the employ of knights and barons, the common men had come to his side, sick of the failures of Lancaster and driven by memories such as Lord Scales using wildfire on a London crowd, all in the name of King Henry. They carried their pollaxes and billhooks like bristles on a hog,
beech handles resting on their shoulders or used as a staff – all overmounted by an iron head. The pollaxes were part axe, part spike and part hammer, while the billhooks tended to have a heavier blade. In unskilled hands, they were still solid cutting tools. In the grip of those who knew them well, they could pierce armour and allow a common man to stand against a knight in plate.

Edward had been astonished at how many of the surly lads marching along with him seemed to nurse a personal grudge against the house of Lancaster. Half of his Kentish and Sussex contingent used the name of Jack Cade as a blessing – and would tell anyone prepared to listen how the queen had broken an old promise of amnesty. They had given their oaths to York out of anger and betrayal. In return, Edward could only bless every mistake Margaret had made.

The cold tightened its grip as they pushed north. At first it was a relief to men who had grown exhausted plunging through sucking mud. They shivered and blew on numb hands and the hard earth was unforgiving when they slipped and fell, yet they made a better pace on the frost. The carts of food and equipment kept up with the marching men on the London road and Edward read tallies of boots and injuries in the evenings, when his servants set up a tent and a meal. He spent hours before sleep overseeing weapons work with his knights. At first, the common soldiers had clustered around the flickering torch square to watch the giant who led them. Something in their stares had irritated Edward and he’d sent them away to their own sword practice. Every night after that had been filled with the shouts of captains and the clash of metal.

Edward could sense the power of a king in the way
others looked to him. He saw it in the knights so eager to spar, to show their worth. It was more than just the favours or even the titles he could bestow. The young knights saw a new England in him, after years of ruin and confusion.

At times, it felt like magic. Edward had asked Warwick about it only once, after a perplexing introduction to a squire too red-faced and choked to speak at all in his presence. Edward frowned whenever he thought of that. He felt some of the same awe, but not so much as to render him speechless. Perhaps it was in him from birth, or because his father had shown him the truth of power.

‘They’ll hang on your every word,’ Warwick had said in London. ‘They’ll flatter you, but they’ll fight for you, long after they should have run – because you are king. They will cherish the memory of just a few words with you as perhaps the most precious moment of their lives. If you are a man to follow, the crown will gild you further and make you … heh, a true giant, a King Arthur in silver armour. On the other hand, if you rape or strike a woman, say … if you show cowardice, if you kill a barking dog even, or show some petty temper, it will be as a mirror breaking.’

The words had gone deep. Edward had only shrugged at the time, though he had committed them to memory and had decided to live by them, with a certainty he could feel in his bones. He had even refused drink each evening, letting the men see him sober and pouring with sweat as he trained. He drank water and ate mutton and salt fish, revelling in his health and youth as he slept like a rock and rose again before dawn.

Four days out from London, they met John Neville coming south. He had made his way down the London
road, following the Roman flagstones and healing as best he could, though some fever still laid him low. Warwick had greeted his brother with riotous delight until he saw the fading bruises and the pus-filled cut on the back of his right hand. Warwick had grown cold then and pushed the men on, turning his brother in his own tracks back to the north.

For his part, John Neville was delighted and awed at the sight of so many thousands. On a fresh horse and fed on meat for the first time in weeks, he recovered enough over the days that followed to ride the bounds of them, trotting his mount for miles to the east and west. He passed on all he had learned, but Derry Brewer had kept him blindfolded whenever there had been something to see. Even so, Warwick gave thanks for his brother’s deliverance. For all he shared a common cause with Edward, there was something disturbing about the unleashed wolf of the new king, simmering with anger at the slightest provocation. Edward was not easy company and Warwick had missed the easy trust he’d shared with his younger brother, where he did not have to watch every word.

King Edward’s host had been nine days on the road when the furthest scouts came across the first sign of a hostile enemy. The London road ran through the village of Ferrybridge, where a fine construction of oak and pine planking had always stretched across the River Aire. The waters now raced past broken and splintered beams, the bridge cut down. Edward’s ranks were a mile east of the crossing and he gave orders for Fauconberg and Warwick’s square to move up and repair the bridge – to build a new one from felled trees so that the army could funnel through and continue its progress north. The city
of York lay not twenty miles further on and Edward was determined to enter those walls and retrieve the relics of his father and brother. Every day lost was one more of humiliation and he would not be denied.

Warwick watched the carpenters work. Overseen by a couple of serjeants who knew their way around peg joints, they had set to with a will. Replacing a bridge was meat and drink to such men, good solid work with the satisfaction of a craft and a task completed. They smiled as they hammered axe-head wedges into birch logs to split them, while others took over with adze, billhook and plane.

The bridge piles were still there, of course, too deeply set to pull out and too wet to burn. They would sit in the water for a century; all his men had to do was put beams and planks over them. They anchored ropes around their waists and risked falling in to carry the planking across the piles, hammering in spikes with massive blows. It was crude work, but it did not have to last for a generation, just a few weeks.

Fauconberg wandered over, eating a wizened apple. Warwick heard him crunch through the core of it and turned.

‘Uncle William,’ Warwick said. ‘It will not be long now. There’s half of it in place already. We’ll be back on the road by tomorrow morning.’

‘I was not checking on you, lad. No, this is land I know well enough. I hunted not ten miles from here with your father when we were young fellows together.’

Warwick’s smile became slightly strained. His uncle’s stories could catch him unawares, so that he felt his eyes
prickle and his breath become short. He resented it, as if it was weakness dragged out of him.

‘Perhaps you could tell me another time, Uncle. I have some papers I must read and letters to finish.’

He looked at the sun and saw it was a smear of light behind grey clouds. There would be lamps lit in his tent and the cold was already bitter.

‘I see,’ Fauconberg said. ‘Go to your work then, Richard. I will not hold you. Your brother John was standing here not an hour back, just chafing to cross the flood. I take pride in you both, you know. You would make your father proud.’

Warwick felt his chest tighten and a surge of anger in response. He inclined his head.

‘Thank you, Uncle. I hope so.’ He gestured to the river, so swollen that the banks were crumbling in swirls of brown clay. ‘The work goes well enough. We’ll move when the sun rises again.’

Lord Clifford was not in the best of moods. He had not appreciated being given the task of cutting the London road to the south and he was near certain that Derry Brewer was behind his being singled out in such a way. It was surely the sort of work better suited to a lowly serjeant or a band of common labourers. There was no need at all for a man of high birth to oversee two hundred archers and as many with axe-handle billhooks, all trudging along and casting resentful glances in his direction. Somerset and Earl Percy of Northumberland would not have agreed to such a task, he was certain. Still, it was done. The bridge had been hacked apart and the pieces thrown into the torrent, to vanish downstream as if it had never existed.
Clifford had asked a senior captain about removing the bridge piles. The man had shown clear insolence on his grinning face – an expression that had earned him a dozen lashes. The man had been popular amongst his fellows, it seemed. Certainly they thought his treatment entitled them to glare at Lord Clifford as they marched back to the main army. He refused to respond to such rudeness, staring always ahead.

‘My lord! Lord Clifford!’ came a voice.

Clifford turned with a sinking feeling, knowing that the strain in the young scout’s voice would be an unlikely herald of good news.

‘Report,’ he commanded, waiting while the scout dismounted and bowed, as he had trained them to do.

‘There is a force of soldiers at the bridge, my lord. Already cutting new wood and nailing on.’

Clifford felt his heart leap in anticipation. The bridge was still down and he had archers. If this was the first sighting of the Yorkist army, he had a chance to wreak havoc in their lines. With the advantage of surprise, he might even manage to thump an arrow through the chest of Warwick or Edward of York himself, the false king whose very existence made heaven rage. He would return to King Henry and Queen Margaret as a hero …

‘My lord Clifford?’ The scout had the temerity to interrupt the bright-coloured visions parading across his eyes. ‘Begging your pardon, my lord, but do you have orders? They were using the old piles across the river and it will not be long before they are on the road behind us.’

Clifford put aside his irritation at the younger man’s questions. He’d known those damned piles would be a problem. If the captain hadn’t burst his heart during the
flogging, he would have dragged him back to the river to have him shown the point.

The sun was setting and Clifford knew he had ridden only a few miles from the broken bridge. He looked at the archers halted around him, suddenly seeing why Somerset had insisted he take such a force for so very ordinary a task.

‘Back to the river, gentlemen! Let us surprise these traitors. We’ll show them what good archers can do.’

The men around him turned where they stood. Without a word, they began a loping trot that ate the miles, racing the fading light of the sun.

As darkness came, Warwick had finished the last morsels of a fine brown trout, caught in the very river he had stared at all day. The temperature had dropped even further and he was weighed down by thick blankets over his jerkin and underclothes. Well wrapped, he was content and beginning to drowse when he heard the jingle of armed men moving. In the black tent, Warwick sat up on his elbows, staring into nothing.

Outside, across the river, he heard voices call for archers to draw. Warwick threw back his coverings and sprang across the tent, yelling for shields as he scrambled into the night.

The camp was not dark, he realized in horror. He had given orders for the work to continue during the night, lit by dim yellow lamps. It meant that the workers out on the river gleamed gold, all oblivious to the sound of men approaching as they hammered and sawed.